Re: Synthetic Vitamin C

 i personally don't think the cause of serious life-altering dysbiosis is as simple as overuse of antibiotics. if this were the case then megadosing of probiotics would solve the problem, but this does not always work for people.

There are several reasons behind this. First of all not all probiotic sources are not live.  Capsuled probiotics could have sat on the shelves of warehouses or stores for years reducing their numbers or killing them altogether.  Sometimes they are shipped in the heat of summer in unrefrigerated trucks also killing them.  Some products, such as "live culture yogurts" are rarely live.  They were live at one time, such as before pasteurization.  But if the bacteria were still live in the containers then they would continue to ferment the sugars present including those added to sweeten the yogurt.  This would cause the containers to swell, which a lot of people would mistake for the presence of pathogenic bacteria that cause cans of food to swell.  Try keeping some store bought kefir in the fridge for a little while and you will see what I mean.  The kefir will have live cultures and will cause the container to swell from the fermentation gases.  But most "liver culture" yogurts do not do this, which means it is highly unlikely that any of the original cultures are still alive.  A problem that has been brought up with freeze dried probiotics is that they likely do not have time to "activate" before passing through the intestinal tract.  These are the reasons I prefer live cultured foods to reestablish the flora.  These include kefirs, sauerkraut, miso, tempeh, etc.

Even more important though that probiotics are prebioitcs.  Prebiotics are fibers that feed the good intestinal flora and allow them to produce their active compounds such as acids, bacteriocides, peroxides and vitamins.  The reason these are really more important deals more with the number of different beneficial bacterial strains.  There are literally thousands of strains of beneficial bacteria in the intestines. No probiotic supplement is going to replace all these strains.  The good news is that antibiotics will not kill off all the bacteria.  There will always be survivors.  But these need to be fed to increase their numbers as well as to feed the flora that are being replaced.  Otherwise the flora simply starve, which does not help the body.

Another problem is that many supplements containing probiotics also add other things that will kill these bacteria immediately.  This is such a common formulating mistake.  For example, I have seen so many products list beneficial bacteria on their labels, then they add things that kill these bacteria such as goldenseal, barberry, Oregon grape root, coptis (goldthread), oregano, silver, etc.